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Sunday, April 9, 2017

fms February 2017

“Fantastic. From audacity to audacity, we lift each other. Spread.”

“It’s time for a festival of audacity. A reader reminded me about an aphorism of Tathagata. A disciple asked Tathagata, ‘Which is the most auspicious day for festivities?’ Tathagata replied with his renowned gentleness, ‘A day before your death.’ Bewildered, the disciple asked, ‘How do we know the day of our death? It has no date, no certainty.’ Tathagata smiled, ‘So, then celebrate and be festive each day.’

“Fantastic. If festivity is our starting line, many assumptions will crumble.”

“Which assumptions?”

“Fantastic! Like job-job-job gives meaning to life. Like, get pulped and ground today to enjoy the breeze from a skyscraper later.”

“The sense life as festivities rolls about in my head. I’m amazed by the variations and differences I see all around.”

“Amazing. Have you seen the beaks of birds? The nectar feeding are different from the fruit eating, which are different from surface skimming, which are different from scything, and those from different from chiseling, which are different from dip netting, which are different from probing, which are different from filter feeding.”

“True. Amazing. My uncle and his friends say that when they went with their inner factory conflicts to other factory workers by standing in street corners for hours, daily, for months, with placards, they sensed an intense diversity and variation in people around them.”

“Fantastic, my friend! But a question. How come we lose this sense of a million variations, and, worse still, become fearful of them?”

“No, it’s even worse! We lock it away. Sometimes words give us a frame, and we get locked inside it. Like us ‘tenants’ in Kapashera. So many of us are tenants. And yet, the word doesn’t bring any closeness between us.”

“Fantastic! But inside the factory, we are in a remarkable closeness. Then again, between factories this closeness weakens. This is my biggest bafflement.”

“My uncle tells me that our generation keeps moving between factories, so we will find a way. He says his generation failed to address this question adequately. But now we need to address it in our own way.”

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